At this time (mid 2006)
only two of these four 'monuments to improvisatory initiatives' exist. The Silo
and De Loods Westerdok have been destroyed, Edelweis and Tetterode survive but
in different ways, devolve.

The SILO's outer shell
(protected by a low level 'industrial monument' rating) has been cleaned
and 'de-mystified', empted and re-filled with (cheap) concrete (expensive)
commercial apartment-cells. DE LOODS and its idyllic quayside plus Westerdok's huge polluted rail
mound and fringing grassland, are erased flattened and handed to
developers for office and apt building. EDELWEIS is at last dissolving into the generalised social
world of private-home-ownership and property-speculation. Owned by its artist
occupiers since 1991, the financial value of
its magnificent living-spaces has risen past the temptation point and most have
already been sold. Only TETTERODE, too vast to rapidly or perhaps ever wholly change, retains
a modicum of its innovative energy - some apts are stagnant but others
differentiate and grow - some have even become
the 'show-homes' of designers and others the 'mansions' of increasingly
bourgeois families.

Shown below is the present
state of the Silo and the De Loods Westerdok sites:

In 199#
the City evicted the Silo occupiers.
By 2002 the Silos had been converted into
one of Amsterdam's most expensive sets of housing blocks. The Old and New Silos
were gutted - their uniquely strange interiors destroyed and the husks
partitioned into a multitude of rectangular concrete spaces; windowed, doored,
staired, and shafted with lifts - almost as utilitarian and mean, boorish and
cynically crude as a suburban speculator's 1960s office-block. The location
alone ensured value.

The Silos' dijk became
a steel-fronted asphalt-topped box, diagrammed for car parking, with a
facade-fringing plank pavement for the softer needs of human soles. At its north
end a brand new housing block was made
(designed by MVRDV - finished 2002), straddling the water, and (it is said)
referencing via its checkered facades the chance-order and vicarious visual
entertainment of stacked shipping containers (an irony: both aesthetic and
social?). This chunk of architectural wit
slightly breaks the tedium of visual and physical simplicity and cleanness.

A
less public, subsidiary entry from the rear quay: here this architect's
'clean anddefinite', seemingly
'minimal and pragmatic' style is exposed by this shoddy mélange as a
cheap and easy
signage that merely makes kitsch references to 'definitive design' and
'quality finish'.

"SILODAM":
DIJK - CENTRE ENTRY-HALL

(paste-up:
x2pics 6-8-05
/ to NNE)

From
the 1st landing, looking through an office space towards the west front.

Except for the
living-boats, whose facilities and moorings have been slightly extended, and
which sustain (especially at the south end) a tiny sanctuary of individualism
and improvisation, the De Loods-Westerdok site has been completely cleared and
is now being covered with vast and commonplace apartment and office
buildings.

The once exquisite,
detailed and richly entertaining dock - a small noise and traffic-sheltered
portion of rural relaxation and natural growth in the midst of city; a walk
graced with continual changes and rich with the entertainment of all types of
individual initiatives - is now a uniform flat perspective of
industrially-manufactured 'cobble-effect' paving edged with large lamp posts.